While you're considering that nugget of information, ask yourself whether the famous politician was wrong?
While you're musing on that question, and if you have a strong stomach, you can read Reason's take on this news, from which I learned of this. But only if you have a strong stomach, because Reason's article features a horrible photo of an Iranian woman who was scourged by her government.
Whie you're looking at the photo, reflect that she probably tempted the Mullahs to scourge her, by wearing skimpy clothing.
The FIRE has been covering the contemptible and craven behavior of the University of Wyoming, which repeatedly canceled scheduled speeches by long-time asshole terror-apologist and boogeyman-to-the-right William Ayers. FIRE cites compelling evidence that the University's excuse — which amounts to caving to a heckler's veto — is bogus, and that University officials actually acted out of hostility to Ayers and his message.
Judge William Downes of the U.S. District Court for the District of Wyoming ordered the University of Wyoming to reverse its decision and let Ayers speak. In doing so, he offered a pitch-perfect explanation:
"This court is of age to remember the Weather Underground. When his group was bombing the U.S. Capitol in 1971, I was serving in the uniform of my country," Downes said. "Even to this day, when I hear that name, I can scarcely swallow the bile of my contempt for it. But Mr. Ayers is a citizen of the United States who wishes to speak, and he need not offer any more justification than that."
Damn right. Let Ayers speak, and let a thousand voices call him out for the scumbag he is.
Many problems beset our great nation. Is it possible to address them all? No. We can barely deal with one in ten thousand. Hence our leaders must prioritize. They must only take up the most pressing problems, and the ones they are best equipped to deal with.
Like, for instance, the government implanting microchips in you against your will.
Georgia's legislature recently held hearings on a bill that would steadfastly announce the position of the Great State of Georgia: nobody may be microchipped against their will. Are we not men, rather than transistor radios?
(b) No person shall be required to be implanted with a microchip.
(c) Any person who implants a microchip in violation of this Code section shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.
(d) Any person required to have a microchip implanted in violation of this Code section may file a civil action for damages.
(e) The voluntary implantation of any microchip may only be performed by a physician and shall be regulated under the authority of the Georgia Composite Medical Board.
How, you might ask, did this problem find its way to the top of the pile, national-crisis-wise? Good question. The Georgia legislature took pains to call witnesses to explain why they should — nay, must — take action:
"Microchips are like little beepers," the woman told the committee. "Just imagine, if you will, having a beeper in your rectum or genital area, the most sensitive area of your body. And your beeper numbers displayed on billboards throughout the city. All done without your permission."
"Ma'am, did you say you have a microchip?" state Rep. Tom Weldon (R) asked the woman.
"Yes, I do. This microchip was put in my vaginal-rectum area," she replied.
No one laughed. State Rep. Wendell Willard (R), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, asked her who had implanted the chip.
"The Department of Defense," she said.
Willard thanked the woman for her input, and the committee later approved the bill.
That last sentence is the payoff.
The fact that this woman believes the Department of Defense implanted a chip in her taint is not funny. Her mental illness is probably a source of great suffering for her. What is funny — in a whistling past the graveyard sort of way — is that the Georgia legislature, in an effort to justify an anti-microchipping bill, called a patently mentally ill person as a witness.
Except that it turns out that isn't particularly funny, either. The poor woman, like the rest of the citizens of Georgia, is an instrument of the state legislators' ambitions. Why spend public time and money holding hearings on bills that would protect citizens form the government implanting microchips in them? Well, because it allows the legislators to suck up to those portions of their base who believe that President Obama's health care plan will result in them being branded with the Mark of the Beast and involuntarily implanted with electronics, as he was planning to do since his birth in Kenya. A bill against microchipping suggests that there is a clear and present danger that the government will seek to implant microchips in us, and earns the proponent of the bill the admiration of the crowd that takes queer comfort in believing exactly that. Look at this legislator throwing his defiance in the teeth of a government seeking to take away our liberties! (Never mind that the legislators in question will almost certainly never deign to investigate, or condemn, the actual abuses of individual liberty that happen every day at the hands of government agents — because those are the kinds of abuses they like.)
So legislators fiddle as Rome burns, and the libertarian cause of genuine concern about real government abuses continues to be marginalized by association.
This is not to say that there is no danger that the government will ever attempt to implant microchips in people without their consent. But it would be a nutty, marginal policy. How nutty? Well, you'd have to be a state legislator to be that nutty.
The commotion started at an event on Monday, where Bertroche appeared alongside other Republicans looking to take on Democratic Rep. Leonard Boswell (D-IA). During a discussion of illegal immigration, Bertroche said: "I think we should catch 'em, we should document 'em, make sure we know where they are and where they are going," according to a local news report. "I actually support microchipping them. I can microchip my dog so I can find it. Why can't I microchip an illegal?"
And Michael Mann, the Penn State professor who authored the "hockey stick" graph which projects the earth boiling and vaporizing in the next hundred years, cannot take a joke.
In fact, global warming is such serious business, and Mann is such a stuffed shirt, that he has threatened to sue the makers of the satiric video "Hide the Decline" for making fun of Mann and his involvement in the "climategate" email scandal, in which climatologists like Mann are alleged to have hidden or manipulated data to exaggerate the predicted effect of man-made global warming. The makers of the video have removed it from Youtube in response to Mann's threats, but people keep uploading it. Here it is.
Rather childish actually, but not so childish as Mann's threats of litigation over a parody in a political controversy into which he has injected himself for years.
Now global warming may indeed be serious business, but get this Michael Mann: the First Amendment is very serious business, and enjoys rather higher stature in courts of law than it does in meteorology and climatology circles. You might even say that the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech concerning political issues (such as the extent of and what to do about global warming) and public figures (such as famed climate scientist Michael Mann) is irrefutably proven. The outcome of a lawsuit against the makers of this satiric video, like the certainty that if nothing is done to reduce carbon emissions the earth will burn to a crisp, is not in doubt.
Mann will lose a lawsuit against the people behind Hide the Decline, just as Man will lose the earth if nothing is done about the coming climatological holocaust. Because the right of free speech allows debate, and satire, and parody, no matter how inane or wrong it may be.
And Mann knows this. His attorney, Peter J. Fontaine of Cozen O'Connor, who is issuing these threats, has advised him that he would lose on the merits. Fontaine is too good a lawyer not to know about New York Times v. Sullivan, a case that would sweep up what are essentially libel claims into the ash-bin of dismissal, whether Mann chooses to phrase them as "illegal use of image" or not. It would be cynical, not to mention wrong, to press a suit here.
Since we know that Mann's attorneys have given him good advice about the state of the law, this means that Mann, or his attorneys, have decided to threaten a non-meritorious lawsuit simply to silence political critics. This is the definition of a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, or SLAPP, which many states have made illegal. Alas, too few. But for many of the other states, there is Rule 11 or the equivalent, which allows a court to award attorney's fees against a party bringing a suit which lacks legal or factual merit.
While a deep-pockted or influential plaintiff, like Mann, may often silence legitimate critics by the threat of a SLAPP, that isn't going to work here. Public interest firms and political entities are offering to defend the people who made this video against Mann's thuggish threats. They hope he files suit, which would allow them to conduct wide-ranging discovery into Mann's science, his beliefs, and whether he's actually manipulated data. They hope to discredit Mann's science, and bankrupt Mann through his own legal bills in the bargain. Cozen O'Connor works a case hard (I know from experience), but they don't work it cheap.
So here's a question Mann should ask his attorneys. who've surely given him the best advice, before going further: Will Cozen O'Connor take the case on a contingent fee, in which they recover nothing if Mann loses but pay themselves from a share of the judgment if he wins?
The answer would tell us, and Mann, a lot about the merits of his claims, and whether this is a SLAPP.
Trish Williams at SearchEngineRanking.ass wants to help me grow my personal injury practice in Seattle, according to an email she just sent me.
Hi! My name is Trish Williams and I am an internet marketing specialist. I googled the word "Seattle personal injury lawyers" and your website is currently ranked 64 for that term.
If you want to get your website to the TOP 10 – We can help! With both Local Business Listing and Organic Search Ranking.
Wait a minute, Ken, you might say. We, your faithful readers, know that you don't practice personal injury law (much), and that you don't practice in Seattle, and that Popehat is not a site you use to promote your practice anyway. What gives?
Well, Trish is apparently confused. She must have looked at severalposts ridiculing sleazy Seattle lawyers for promoting themselves through comment spam, became disoriented, and concluded that we are ourselves Seattle lawyers promoting ourselves on this site. Perhaps Trish has special needs. Perhaps Trish has recently sustained a major head injury.
Or perhaps, more likely, Trish and her company use some sort of program to spam blogs with emails automatically when pre-selected search terms appear upon them, without any human being checking first to see if the search term actually has anything to do with the blog. Perhaps Trish is a friend or associate of SEO spammer Jamie Spottz, who previously offered us some entertainment, and uses a similar brand name. Perhaps Trish has relied upon impersonal software and has not, personally, contemplated the irony of sending marketing spam to a web site based on its posts ridiculing and criticizing spam marketing.
Perhaps potential customers of Trish and SearchEngineRanking.ass should ask themselves — why would I pay good money to "marketing experts" who themselves market through irritating spam? Why would I trust my reputation to people who would promote themselves that way? Why would I trust my reputation to people who would not only market themselves through offensive and impertinent spam, but would use their own names and put their own pictures on the internet while they do it?
When you outsource your marketing — including search engine placement — you outsource your ethics and your reputation.
That breathtaking quote (go on, take a moment, read it again. Soak it in..) is from Violent J a member of the Insane Clown Posse. He was discussing the reaction to their new video "Miracles" which marvels at things like magnets, giraffes and rainbows. And uses 80s level greenscreens as well. The New York Times spent a little time delving into the bizarrely thin line between the reality and parody of the various works of the Posse. It is a trove of great quotes. A few of my favorites:
"If Celine Dion would have come out with that song, people would have been, like, “Oh, that’s a beautiful song.” But because it’s coming out of our mouths, all of a sudden, we’re retards."
"We don’t like to tell people exactly what the song means to us. If you tell them what it really means to you, that might switch their whole perspective of that song. A couple might be like, “That’s our song.” Or, remember that the day they got out of jail, that was my jam. A summertime anthem, whatever. But that song right there, it’s about just appreciating the small things in life."
and perhaps the best "I think we might have misused the word miracle."
The Geocitiesizer makes any website look like something dreamed up in the 1990s. I have some quibbles with our page design (it's asymmetric), but when I see this artist's recreation of Popehat as it might have been ten years ago, my concerns vanish.
Stephen Hawking thinks that it's a bad idea to contact alien civilizations:
Earth had better watch out, at least according to Stephen Hawking. He has suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist — but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all it that can to avoid any contact. …
He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.”
He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”
While I agree that any aliens reaching the stars are likely to be similar to humans or worse, meaning chauvinistic and rapacious but more technologically advanced, the problem is that we've been contacting alien civilizations since the 1920s through commercial radio, which bleeds off into space. The signals from Mexican border radio stations of the 1950s, designed to be heard loud and clear in Chicago and New York, are already introducing aliens to Buddy Holly and Little Richard, and will continue to do so forever.
Google on Tuesday was sued in a Wisconsin court for allegedly violating the privacy rights of Beverly Stayart, an animal rights activist and the CFO and director of business development at Stayart Law Offices, the firm filing the complaint.The lawsuit claims that Google is responsible for suggesting the search term "bev stayart levitra" as a user types "bev stayart" and is profiting from this association through the sale of ads on search results pages triggered by those keywords.
Levitra is a sexual dysfunction drug, and thus a term to which some might wish to avoid being linked.
"Google is misleading consumers, in Wisconsin and throughout the world, by selling the keyword phrase 'bev stayart levitra' and placing 'sponsored links' advertisements for Levitra, other male sexual dysfunction drugs, and other medicines and products on the page 'bev stayart levitra' on Google's Web site," the complaint states.
You have to admire Bev Stayart. Most people who run a Google or Yahoo or Alta Vista or Bing search on their own names don't go much past page two. Beverly Stayart goes to eleven.
As we advised Beverly Stayart the last time we covered one of her lawsuits, all it takes is a little work to turn a bad search engine profile around. Of course Beverly Stayart's detractors, such as Frederick "Fred" J. Otto, Intellectual Property Attorney and Computer Engineer, claimed that a little person like Bev Stayart can't beat the search engines at their own game. But we think differently. In under two years, Beverly Stayart has removed her personal association with Cialis and Levitra and Viagra and the like, to replace them with words like "serial litigant," "frequent filer," "frivolous lawsuit," "Section 230," and "Rule 11".
If people can eat delicious, savory schnitzels on the sidewalks of New York, the terrorists will have won.
[T]hey're kicking out the Schnitzel & Things truck from a spot at East 54th Street and Lexington Avenue because of…a terrorist threat? Schnitzel & Things Tweeted, "Dear all, we've been kicked out by cops because of complaints from citicorp. The reason they gave = 'we are a terrorist threat' Lol WTF????"
We spoke to Schnitzel & Things' Gene Voss who said that when the police first told him to move the truck, he showed that he was legally parked and permitted. The police also looked at his and his employees vending permits. The police left but returned saying that since the Citigroup Building is such a high-profile building (and possible terrorist target), the Citigroup could make a complaint citing a terrorist threat and cops were essentially empowered to make him leave.
I'm not sure whether Citigroup actually did complain about a rogue schnitzelmobile in its parking lot (according to Voss, Citigroup emloyees were hungrily devouring the terrrorist treats), in which case the cops were just following orders, or the cops were acting on their own initiative. That Gene Voss had to move his schnitzelmobile is just a symptom. It isn't the disease.
The disease is that we have passed so many laws, policies, and regulations, in the name of protecting ourselves from terrorists, that cops have the authority to order a harmless schnitzelwagon from a parking lot on the spurious grounds that it may constitute a terrorist threat. Worse, even when they don't have that authority, we have passed so many laws that the cops believe they do. We have given the police the impression that they have unbridled discretion, whether it's to arrest people for carrying cash, or simply for wearing silly t-shirts.
The police are the real victims here. They are victims of our fear. We have imposed such demands on them, through unneeded laws, that they feel compelled to exercise their authority, even against their better instincts. After all, who but an overworked, frightened policeman would actually want to evict a delicious schnitzel truck, or shoot a playful dog? Who would put himself up for ridicule on the internet, if he didn't believe the law compelled it?
In a genuine emergency, the policeman will sill have authority to order a schnitzel truck off the street. But in the absence of an emergency, it's time we did the policeman. the dogs, and the schnitzel trucks a favor. It's time we repealed a few laws, scaled back the security alerts, and took responsibility ourselves to beat up the terrrorists. Are we not men? Do we not wear belts?
Support your local policeman. Repeal an anti-terrorism law, or vote for someone who will. Do it for the schnitzels.
In any event, Google has heard the cries of the helpless and is making it much easier for parodists to get their videos back online. YouTube now has a "fair use" button, so if the creator of the original content pulls your video, it is simple to claim fair use and have the parody restored. The ball is back in the court of the person claiming the original copyright to do the hard work of filing a formal DMCA complaint, which is more work than simply pushing a button.
The solution isn't perfect, because if a company can easily generate boilerplate takedown notices, deep pockets continue to give them a structural advantage (as always). At the same time, the DMCA notice have to be submitted in the face of a claim of fair use, which ups the ante if the parodist submits a counterclaim for abuse of process. And anything that makes it more difficult to pull a video is better for fair use.
Via BoingBoing. (In the course of writing this, I saw that Chris put it in the comments of the original post as well, so thanks for the tip, Chris.)
Republican Congressman Jeff Flake, who represents Arizona’s Sixth District, along with Democratic Congressmen Ron Kind of Wisconsin and Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Republican Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, sent a letter to President Obama urging him to resolve the U.S.-Brazil trade dispute by reforming U.S. agricultural subsidies, instead of making annual payments to Brazil.
A recent ruling by the World Trade Organization in a long-standing trade dispute between the U.S. and Brazil over U.S. cotton programs authorized Brazil to impose more than $800 million worth of tariff increases and cross-retaliation measures. In lieu of the $800 million in punitive penalties, the United States Department of Agriculture and the United States Trade Representative offered Brazil an annual payment of $147.3 million.
As John Thacker, in a comment at Hit & Run points out, this is the government's dilemma and solution:
1. The government wants to subsidize American cotton farmers at the expense of taxpayers, to keep cotton artificially competitive.
2. Brazil, whose cotton is actually competitive (meaning cheap), complains this is illegal.
3. Therefore, the government will also subsidize Brazilian cotton farmers.
This scheme is so cotton-picking insane that it has united near opposites, Congressmen Jeff Flake, Paul Ryan, Ron Kind, and Barney Frank, against it. All that these men have in common is a modicum of intelligence and horse sense, something our government seems unable to produce for itself by any tax, stimulus, or regulation.
It makes me happy to know that no matter what massive and tiny disagreements we may have, we can all agree on one thing – Ronald Reagan has no place on US Money. I'm pleased that it is just as unpopular with Republicans as it is with Democrats. Isn't it enough that his name adorns the site of his anti union machinations? I have no problem with taking Grant off the $50, but not if Reagan is the replacement.
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Apr 30, 2010 
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Iran, United Nations
